Customer Profile

Established in 1998, Carsoup is a one-stop online destination for buying new and used vehicles. Carsoup.com has partnered with more than 10,000 dealers across the US. It functions as a place for information on vehicle finance, expert opinions, also act as a search engine for buying cars, recreational vehicles, motorcycles, etc.

The Objective

As a part of its monetization strategy, Carsoup.com offers advertising packages on its site to sellers and car dealers. They used conventional ad units, pop-ups, and pop-unders for displaying such ads to users. Needless to say, ad-blockers played spoilsport. Moreover, users are generally blinded to such ad units. All of this, in effect, led to abysmal impressions and clickthroughs.

The WebEngage Effect

There are good ways to advertise and then there are better ways to advertise on your site. It is important that you choose wisely between the types of ads you want to display and how much incremental revenue you want to earn with advertising.

Pop-ups and pop-unders are intrusive to user interaction, they cause annoyance and considerably obstruct user experience. A good on-site ad should be able to cut through the clutter and deliver the ad message in a subtle manner. Moreover, it should reach a specific target segment & remain relevant to the audience.

Back to the problem at hand, to overcome the challenge posed by pop-up blocking technology (ad-blockers) the logical way is to circumvent it entirely. A pop-over ad (an overlay that does not open a new tab or window) does exactly that by remaining in the same window or web page as the user.

Using WebEngage’s Notification product Carsoup.com displayed advertisements to a targeted set of users. The ads pop into action based on a predefined set of rules. These rules are set using – visitor location, cookie information, device type (mobile or desktop), the source of visit (such as Google Ads, Ad Campaign, or Organic traffic), time of visit, type of user (repeat or new visitor), etc.

Take for instance this ad displayed on Carsoup.com to visitors coming from a particular geographical area (Atlanta, US).

Carsoup.com used Nielsen’s DMA (Designated Market Area) regions of the US to define the Market ID of visitors on the site. The DMA’s were converted to DoubleClick representation. Read more about it here.

With Cookie-based targeting, the ads were geo-targeted to visitors coming from Atlanta (The DoubleClick value 26 is 524 for Nielsen’s DMA, which specifies Atlanta)

The Result

Carsoup.com across all its ad campaigns in the past year registered an average CTR of 4%. Thanks to targeting capabilities of WebEngage’s notifications (popovers or overlays).

Comparing this 4% CTR with the data for online ads in the US, for the automobile sector in the past five years. The average CTR is 0.12%. That’s an enormous 33 times better.

The new advertising inventory using Popovers (overlays) performed better than pop-ups and pop-unders. It directly translated into increased advertising revenue for Carsoup.com and it goes without saying that effective advertising meant better ROI for advertisers. A win-win for all stakeholders.

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